Bob Dylan (15 page)

From there, the narrative rattles along with the berserk logic of dreams (at one point, a foot bursts out of a telephone), while riding roughshod over such sacred establishment cows as the flag, police, religion and capitalism. Like the dysfunctional family of ‘On The Road Again', this dream-America is fraught with ludicrous dangers and inexplicable sights: exploding desserts, runaway bowling-balls, talking cows, predatory French girls, paranoid coast guards and, of course, naval traffic wardens, all of whom exert their influence on our hero. Eventually tiring of his ordeal, the narrator returns to the ship and sets off back across the ocean, passing
en route
a ship bearing a certain Christopher Columbus, to whom he offers, more in sympathy than hope, “Good luck.”

The surreal imagery of ‘Bob Dylan's 115th Dream' led many to suppose that this was one of the first “drug songs” for which Dylan and his peers would become notorious. There were, however, precedents for the song's loopy, extempore style in Bob's youth, according to his teenage buddy John Bucklen, who recalled that the pair of them would pass many evenings ad-libbing nonsense songs. “We'd get a guitar and sing verses we made up as we went along,” he told Robert Shelton. “It came out strange and weird. We thought we'd send them in somewhere, but we never did.”

The song's false start came about when the backing musicians missed their cue, but Bob kept on singing, cracking up with laughter a line or two into the song, along with producer Tom Wilson and everyone else—though only Dylan's hilarity was caught on tape. He insisted the mistake should be retained on the album, telling Wilson he would even be prepared to pay for its inclusion. Edited on to the beginning of a bona-fide band take, the laughter sets up the tenor of the song, and makes the band's entrance all the more dynamic.

After the sardonic absurdity of ‘Bob Dylan's 115th Dream', Dylan chose to start the second side of the album with his most luminous, meditative song yet. Begun on the 1964 cross-country trip, as his station-wagon left New Orleans for Texas on February 12 and completed a month or two later at the New Jersey home of his journalist friend Al Aronowitz (who claims to have rescued Bob's discarded false starts from the wastebasket), ‘Mr Tambourine Man' had been considered for inclusion on
Another Side Of Bob Dylan
. It had been recorded, with Ramblin' Jack Elliott providing harmonies on the choruses, at the June 9 session which produced that entire album, but was ultimately left
off the record because Dylan “felt too close to it to put it on.”

While there's no doubt that it would have sat well within
Another Side Of Bob Dylan's
prevailing mood of ruminative melancholy, the song has an added strength and power on
Bringing It All Back Home
, where its plea for artistic liberation underlines the first side's break with tradition. Not for nothing did Dylan choose to play this song and ‘It's All Over Now, Baby Blue' when he was called back to perform solo for a crowd who'd just booed his backing band offstage at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival: but what the audience, relieved at the sight of Dylan toting an acoustic guitar again, took as a
mea culpa
recanting of his rock experiment, was actually an implicit statement that, whatever
they
desired of him, he must follow his muse wherever it led him.

At the time, ‘Mr Tambourine Man' was widely considered to be a drug song, its exultant imagery and urge for transcendence seen as analogizing the psychedelic experience. What, such interpreters demanded, could “smoke rings of my mind” refer to, if not marijuana? And that request to “Take me on a trip…”—an LSD trip, surely? For most listeners, their first encounter with the song came via The Byrds' hit single, and it's easy to understand how the sleek, euphoric rush of their version might lead one to such a conclusion. But to impose such a narrow interpretation on the song is to miss its wider meaning, which has more to do with the artist's invocation of his/her muse (here confusingly cast as a male figure, rather than the more usual female). That much is clear from Dylan's own more haunted delivery, in which the desired transcendence is always slightly out of reach, an aim and an ideal, rather than an indulgence. It's one of Dylan's most mesmerizing performances, burnished with a wistful, gently swaying harmonica break which perfectly evokes the sense of lonely aesthetic reverie.

The first verse finds the writer, late at night, tired but unable to sleep, facing the blank page again. (The Clancy Brothers' Liam Clancy, a folk-singing friend of Dylan's from his early years in New York, told journalist Patrick Humphries that when he first heard Dylan sing the line about the “
ancient empty street [that's] too dead for dreaming,” he
knew
Bob was referring to “Sullivan Street on a Sunday”). In the second verse, the writer appeals for inspiration, “ready to go anywhere” his muse might lead, if (s)he should only “cast your dancing spell” his way. The third verse offers a reassurance that any “vague traces of skippin' reels of rhyme” the muse might hear echoing his tambourine would merely be a “ragged clown” (the writer himself) chasing the elusive shadow of poetic perfection cast by the muse. Finally, in the fourth verse, the writer appeals again for an artistic experience outside the realms of memory and fate, beyond the bounds of time and place: a visionary experience in which the overwhelming immediacy of the aesthetic now obliterates more mundane, ego-directed notions of past, present and future.

Several sources have been claimed as the inspiration for the central pied-piper image of the tambourine man, though Dylan himself cites guitarist Bruce Langhorne, who attended an earlier recording session with a gigantic tambourine, “big as a wagon-wheel.” Fittingly, it's Langhorne who provides the floating droplets of electric guitar which are the only accompaniment to Dylan's own voice and rhythm guitar here.

Dylan admitted to Nora Ephron and Susan Edmiston that his writing style was influenced by William Burroughs (“a great man”) and claimed that, like the beat author, he too collected photographs which illustrated his songs. “I have photographs of ‘Gates Of Eden' and ‘It's All Over Now, Baby Blue',” he said. “I saw them after I wrote the songs. People send me a lot of things and a lot of the things are pictures, so other people must have that idea too.”

It's hardly surprising that ‘Gates Of Eden' should inspire visual responses, as the song contains some of Dylan's most vivid, unsettling dream imagery, and may itself have been inspired by William Blake's pictorial sequence
The Gates Of Paradise
. Like ‘A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall', each verse—virtually each couplet—stands on its own as a discrete tableau, combining to offer a devastating evocation of societal entropy. The song sets up hopeful expectations with the title ‘Gates Of Eden', but it's actually about an Eden from which paradise has been eroded: there is a terrible stench of decay and corruption about the imagery, and Dylan's portentous delivery of each verse's closing line offers a warning rather than a welcome. This Eden is a place to be avoided, where the best that can be expected is oblivion.

When he debuted the song at his New York Philharmonic Hall concert on October 31, 1964, Dylan introduced the song as “a sacrilegious lullaby in G minor,” a light-hearted description nevertheless borne out by the depiction of “Utopian hermit monks” sharing a saddle on the Golden Calf with “Aladdin and his lamp.” Religion, he seems to be suggesting, is composed of equal parts piety and magic, an unhealthy combination of morality, smoke and mirrors, whose protagonists' “promises of paradise” raise only hollow laughter from Eden's inhabitants.

Elsewhere, small-minded, gray-flanneled citizens are shocked by biker molls, impotent paupers chase materialist goals, industrialized cities remain impervious to babies' cries, secretive kingmakers determine power relations and “friends and other strangers,” in an elegant twist on the notion of resignation, “from their fates try to resign.” Throughout, the catalogue of hardship and debasement is recurrently wiped clean at the end of each verse, rendered meaningless by the looming specter of the Gates Of Eden. Finally, the narrator is woken from his nightmare visions by his lover,
who, like the beatific woman of ‘Love Minus Zero/ No Limit', reports her own dreams without trying to decipher them; perhaps, he thinks, that is the best way to deal with his own visions, which seem somehow truer, more revealing of life, than strict narrative interpretations. After all, as he concludes, “there are no truths outside the Gates Of Eden.”

With its ponderous delivery, methodical strumming and bare arrangement—the only embellishment is a single windswept wheeze of harmonica planting a full-stop at the end of each verse—‘Gates Of Eden' is the closest Dylan had come to an outright sermon since ‘The Times They Are A-Changin'-'; but compared with the clarity of that song's well-targeted attack, this one offers only a troubling perception of general unease, a glimpse of a hell which we may already inhabit.

At almost six minutes long, the song was the perfect B-side partner for ‘Like A Rolling Stone', adding extra layers of dense imagery to the A-side's oblique character-assassination, and making it, at nearly 12 minutes in total, by far the longest single that had ever been released—a factor which added to the perception of Dylan as a serious young man with a lot to say.

(I'm Only Bleeding)

Though more direct in its imagery, ‘It's Alright, Ma' shares the same sense of societal entropy as ‘Gates Of Eden'. But rather than disguise his critique behind clouds of allusion, here Dylan unsheathes his verbal dagger and plunges it squarely into the breast of contemporary American culture, in lines requiring little or no deciphering. The title itself is a sly multiple pun, recalling both Dylan's own ‘Don't Think Twice, It's All Right' and ‘That's All Right, Mama', the Arthur Crudup song which provided Elvis Presley with his breakthrough first single.

The opening image, of “Darkness at the break of noon,” echoes the title of Arthur Koestler's anti-communist novel
Darkness At Noon
, suggesting that the human spirit can be cast into shade just as much by the rampant consumerism of a capitalist society in which manufacturers can make “everything from toy guns that spark/To flesh-colored Christs that glow in the dark,” as by the dead hand of communism. Corporate America and its Madison Avenue advertising industry thought-police, the song claims, are just as effective as communist brainwashing and show-trials in determining peoples' attitudes and mapping out their psyches.

There follows a catalogue of capitalist shame in 15 verses, punctuated by four cautionary choruses. As with ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues', many lines were subsequently abstracted as slogans of the burgeoning counterculture: “Money doesn't talk, it swears” became the favored catchphrase of any scuffling hustler on the wrong end of a deal, while “even the president of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked” was pronounced with grim glee at the time of Richard Nixon's resignation. Most tellingly of all, “he not busy being born is busy dying” offered an update of the theme of ‘The Times They Are A-Changin'-' in which the target was switched, from the old and out-of-touch, to the young listeners themselves: only through the perpetual rebirth of new experience, the song suggested, could the pervasive entropy be staved off.

Like ‘Gates Of Eden', the stripped-bare backing offers little distraction (or protection) from the words, which cut through the parade of hypocrisy and deceit like a machine-gun. Following the descending chord-sequence as it spirals abjectly away down the plughole, Dylan's deadpan, declamatory delivery here is surely one of the most potent precursors of rap, though the occasional tug of nihilism glimpsed in lines like “There is no sense in trying” and “I got nothing, Ma, to live up to” is nowhere near as hopelessly final as the nihilism of contemporary hip-hop culture.

Despite this, ‘It's Alright, Ma' was undoubtedly one of the songs to which Joan Baez was referring when she criticized Dylan's supposed nihilism and lack of what she saw as “commitment” during this period. She later admitted that, in the sour aftermath of their split, she couldn't listen to his records from this period very often; if she had, she might have recognized that, far from abandoning the search for a solution to society's problems, Dylan was laying the groundwork for that decade's momentous changes of heart and mind with songs like ‘It's Alright, Ma'.

As with his last two albums, Dylan chooses to close
Bringing It All Back Home
with a song casting off old allegiances, bidding farewell to attitudes and acquaintances that have slipped irrevocably from his orbit as he spins off in a new direction. Some thought it was written about Bob's blue-eyed old friend Paul Clayton, though Dylan later denied this. The inspiration, he
claims in the annotations for the
Biograph
box set, came from a much more innocent source, the Gene Vincent song ‘Baby Blue', which had stuck in the back of his memory since he used to sing it back at Hibbing High School. “Of course,” he adds with droll superfluity, “I was singing about a different Baby Blue.”

We can well imagine that this different Baby Blue is likely to have been Joan Baez, judging by the retinue of dispossessed orphans, empty-handed painters and pestering vagabonds whose fates occupy so much of her concern. Alternatively, it could be a self directed piece, the singer coming to terms with the enormous changes taking place in his life and career, drawing new inspiration from the
I Ching
(“take what you have gathered from coincidence”), and attempting to escape from the pursuing hordes of followers and imitators “standing in the clothes that you once wore.” This last line would take on a devastating pertinence when, in a scene captured in the
Don't Look Back
documentary of Dylan's May 1965 tour of England, he played the song for Donovan during a party in his suite at the Savoy Hotel.